The present invention relates to the electrical, electronic and computer arts, and, more particularly, to image recognition and the like.
Malignant melanoma is one of the most common and the deadliest type of skin cancer. Melanoma survival rate depends on its stage and thickness; while advanced melanoma is still incurable, it has been shown that early detection of melanoma and immediate surgical excision of the lesion can increase the survival rate by five times. Dermoscopy image analysis has become an important non-invasive tool for the early diagnosis of melanoma. However, due to the subjectivity of human expert interpretation of dermoscopy images, computer aided dermoscopy image analysis has drawn more attention in the last decade. Lesion segmentation and identifying the mole/lesion from the surrounding skin area is the first step in automated dermoscopy image analysis. The accuracy of the skin lesion segmentation is important for an accurate implementation of the downstream steps in ABCD diagnostic technique, because diagnostic features such as asymmetry and border irregularity rely on the border detection results.